As another year (and what a year…) draws to a close, I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time. Because of the relative frequency of my treatment schedule and the fact I have a couple of days after each treatment where I’m largely out of commission, I live with a near constant sense of an impending deadline. As each treatment day approaches, I feel much like I do when I’m readying for a trip–there’s always a list of things I need and want to do before we leave, and it always seems the time is too short to make it all happen.
Curious as to its origins, I looked up the etymology of “deadline” in the Online Etymology Dictionary, and found, in addition to the unsurprising reference to “1920, American English newspaper jargon,” the following, rather grim citation: “Perhaps influenced by earlier use (1864) to mean the ‘do-not-cross’ line in Civil War prisons, which figured in the trial of Henry Wirz, commander of the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.
And he, the said Wirz, still wickedly pursuing his evil purpose, did establish and cause to be designated within the prison enclosure containing said prisoners a “dead line,” being a line around the inner face of the stockade or wall enclosing said prison and about twenty feet distant from and within said stockade; and so established…he, the said Wirz, instructed the prison guard stationed around the top of said stockade to fire upon and kill any of the prisoners aforesaid who might touch, fall upon, pass over or under [or] across the said “dead line” …. [“Trial of Henry Wirz,” Report of the Secretary of War, Oct. 31, 1865]”
Talk about harsh consequences for missing a deadline. Yikes. Not striking something off my list for a few more days pales in comparison.
Writer Gretchen Rubin tells us, “The days are long, but the years are short.” As we round out 2020, I think a lot of folks might revise that statement: “The days are long, but the year was interminable.”
We are all so tired–the medical community, especially–of the pandemic and the damage it’s doing. Yet we’re so close to turning a corner, now, with the vaccine being distributed. We have to be patient, stay the course, even when it’s hard, because the consequences for not doing so are potentially so much worse. Reminding myself that I’m sacrificing a few “good” days up front so that I can have more days, period, down the line is what gets me through the toughest chemo side effects.
Actually, many of the coping strategies I’ve learned from fighting cancer have helped me meet the challenges of this crazy year. Going bald, for example, quickly settled the whole “should I or shouldn’t I risk getting a haircut?” question. But seriously, I’ve had a lot of practice at doing what the mother of one of my fellow cancer survivors preached: “accept and adjust.” I adapted quickly to wearing a mask, partly because I’ve already learned to adjust my daily wardrobe in more intrusive ways, pulling on a compression sleeve each morning before I even put on my underwear. It’s just what needs to be done, and spending energy bemoaning the discomfort or inconvenience is a waste of time.
And I understand that, like cancer, coronavirus is a sneaky little bugger, especially with its asymptomatic spread. I hear so many people say, “But ____ hasn’t had any symptoms,” as if that’s proof they aren’t infected or infectious. It’s counter-intuitive to believe something invisible, something as tiny and common as a virus, could wreak havoc upon your health. Trust me, when the rash appeared under my arm that signaled the return of cancer, a reddish patch not much bigger than a couple of quarters, it seemed utterly absurd that something so small and benign-looking could be life-threatening. It’s hard–but necessary–to get your head around.
If you’re tired of me, or anyone else, banging on about the virus and masking and being safe, I offer this: the last four years have shown me, again and again, how profoundly your entire world can change in an instant. I understand at a deep and visceral level that we are all vulnerable to such sudden shifts. Acknowledging that isn’t succumbing to pessimism or negative thinking; it is, in fact, its opposite. It is that knowledge that encourages me to treasure time, to try to spend it wisely.
“The days are long, but the years are short.” On the whole, Rubin’s statement resonates with me. But as we look forward to a new year (with a new vaccine), I think there’s also value in flipping her statement, our perspective. The days until we can move toward a different (improved) reality are drawing short, and there is hope in that. And if we can hold out and take care of ourselves and each other, our years will, god- and the universe-willing, be long.
Happy New Year, friends! May 2021 bring us all health, happiness, and peace.
Still, as surgery looms on the horizon, I’ve grown more aware of how the language of aggression, while ostensibly empowering, also pits one against one’s own body in some curious and distressing ways. My sister-in-law Lisa, a survivor, mentioned her discomfort with this language shortly after I was diagnosed. Susan Sontag, in a 1978 essay entitled “Illness as Metaphor,” describes the dilemma: “The controlling metaphors in descriptions of cancer are, in fact, drawn…from the language of warfare; every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology. Thus, cancer cells do not simply multiply; they are ‘invasive’” (714). The language surrounding treatment has a similar inflection: chemotherapy is “chemical warfare, using poisons” that aim to “kill” (715).
The main reason I resist is that none of us knows the future. That’s a fundamental truth. It isn’t that I don’t want to be healthy and cured—of course I do! But it feels like tempting fate to declare certainty in relation to a particular outcome; I don’t and can’t make predictions. I can only know the present.
If this is my life (and it is) and if my life (like all our lives) is finite, and if I don’t know its deadline (and none of us does), then how do I want to spend it? Waiting and wishing for a different kind of life, a different kind of day, a “better” one in some projected future? Or do I find a way to accept where I am in the present, since that’s all any of us really knows or has?
Despite her reassurances that there was no immediate evidence of metastasis, I would need a CT scan and a bone scan to be certain the cancer hadn’t progressed beyond the local nodes. I kept shaking, so the staff moved mountains to schedule the tests as soon as possible, three days away, that Friday. Results would likely come after the weekend.
The noun weight comes from the Old English gewiht, “weighing, weight, downward force of body, heaviness.” The figurative sense of “burden” arrives in the late 14th century. 
The literal meaning of the verb “weight,” as in “to load with weight” is recorded first in 1747. Its figurative meaning, to load the mind with weight, appeared earlier, as early as the 1640s. 
Given a choice, I would not have elected to suffer through those two days of waiting and wondering. But it threw my perspective into sharp focus, gave me a fierce appreciation for the beauty all around me: the gritty give of warm sand under my feet; the spicy bite of fresh shrimp cooked with Old Bay seasoning; the constellation of freckles on my husband’s smiling face. And the sun shining out from behind a darkened cloud.
Still Life, Beyond Cancer 